Wounded Nation, Voided State: Sara Uribe’s Antígona González

At the conclusion of his now classic Antigones, as if yielding to the limits of his ambitious attempt to document the legacy of the Greek heroine in Western literature, art and thought, George Steiner states: “Antigones past and present have proved beyond inventory. Already there are so many gathering in the twilight of tomorrow” (199). Among those that would follow his now classic work is Sara Uribe’s Antígona González (2012),¹ a book-length dramatic poem that draws once again on the Sophoclean tragedy to re-enact the living hell experienced by those victimized by the violence and uncertainty that have characterized Mexican reality during the U.S.-backed drug war in Mexico.

The return of Antigone to the here and now of Mexico in the first decade of the twenty-first century is no surprise. Echoing Steiner’s claim that the “Antigone-and-Creon syntax and the myth in which they are manifest” are found “whenever, wherever, in the western legacy, we have found ourselves engaged in the confrontation of justice and of the law” (138), the Argentine Rómulo E. Pianacci, at the conclusion of his Antígona: Una tragedia latinoamericana, argues that Latin America has been especially fertile ground for the return of Antigone. Paying special attention to the role of women, and citing Raúl Antelo, Pianacci states:

. . . es en el contexto americano, donde Antígona adquiere su gran protagonismo. Representante de las mujeres del continente, reactualiza la función efectiva y simbólica, fundamental y emblemática de las mujeres en el entramado social y político de la cultura. Son ellas las que abandonan el interior de las casas para denunciar los excesos del tirano, son ellas las que invocan el derecho de los muertos de recibir sepultura, son ellas las que se arriesgan, en contra de la Ley y nombre de esa noción tan indefinible y abstracta como imposible de circunscribir que es “la Justicia.” Ellas construyen su lugar a partir de agenciamientos discursivos, universos definidos por lo que Raúl Antelo caracteriza como “melancólicamente soñar como mujer un lugar ante la polis, que es un lugar ante la ley.”

(177)

While Antígona González could be characterized broadly in these terms, Uribe’s poetic re-reading of the Greek tragedy reveals a transformation of the play’s core agon. By “transformation” I mean that the anticipated conflict between kinship and the state, as well as the related antithetical tensions between woman and man, nature and culture, eros and reason, that have hitherto defined the Greek heroine, are neutralized by the conspicuous and eerie silence, the indifference, and ultimately the voiding of an intelligible and reliable state or Law. This absence or voiding, in turn, alters what has been the Antigone-figure’s perennial role, which, in the words of Judith Butler is to speak truth with and against power and “confront and defy the state” (1).

Below I develop a reading of Uribe’s poem that considers how the unique context out of which Antígona González emerges, that is, a debilitated Mexican state that has yielded control to dark forces of global capitalism, shapes her agency and power. Mainly, she is not driven fatally to stand up to the Law or state authorities as there is an implicit and collective acknowledgement within the social space constructed in the poem that there is no visible state or Law to stand up to. This same context, moreover, creates the necessary conditions for her to activate alternative strategies to carry out her obligation to her disappeared brother. These same strategies re-imagine and recover a precarious form of community – the green shoots of a fledgling and inchoate nation – that, while rekindling human interactions around shared grief and a common purpose, also constitute a compelling poetic protest against the state of affairs of Mexico in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

“Aquí no hay país”

The character, Antígona González, as well as the eponymous poem, emerge within the volatile context of the still...